There’s also the passage I quoted in post 49, which talks about the sun moving; I doubt that Shakespeare was describing the sun orbiting the center of our galaxy. (Incidentally, that’s from Hamlet, not Much Ado About Nothing, as I originally indicated. My bad. It’s Hamlet’s love letter to Ophelia, which Polonius reads aloud.)
I know this post was not directed towards me but does the inscription on Shakespeare’s funerary monument count as a ‘document’? I see no reason why Shakespeare’s family would liken him to Virgil and Socrates and specifically praise his ‘writt’ & ‘art’ if they merely viewed him as a successful small businessman.
The monument and its inscription are somewhat mysterious. This page seems to try to take an even-handed view, mentions some of the oddities — e.g. that the bust first showed a wool merchant, not a penman — and would answer your question (with the sentence I’ve underlined below) if we could trust it. (Can we? Is there a cite for the claim that the family didn’t commission, build or pay for the Monument?)
From the late 15th century until the 19th, the Kings of Navarre were also Kings of France or of Castille and Aragon, depending on which side you take and which exact year you’re looking at. And yet, despite France, Castille and Aragon all having sea coasts during that period, Navarre does not.
This is something else we’ve done before. To repeat what I previously pointed out to you, in 2006 the Oxford Shakespeare Society dropped the crest of the lion brandishing a broken spear as the logo of its newsletter on realising that the idea that it had ever been Oxford’s crest was based on a series of misunderstandings.
https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/SOSNL_2006_3.pdf (pp. 1, 17-20).
The Monoux family, some of whom were called William, were a reasonably prominent gentry family whose wealth derived from the late Mayor of both Bristol and London, George Monoux. But then again, if you think that Oxford was going around using the names of real people as pseudonyms, that’s hardly going to convince you that you’re almost certainly wrong.
Not much of ‘weird mystery’ when the source on which that is based, i.e. the Venetian ambassador, believed that Southampton had been arrested for plotting to kill some of the King’s Scottish courtiers. This is even less mysterious when one remembers that James VI and I was, with very good reason, always panicky about his own safety. Also, Southampton had in recent weeks been one of the leading opponents in Parliament of James’s pet project for a union between Scotland and England. That the accusations against Southampton were almost certainly invented still doesn’t mean that one need look beyond that immediate political context for a sufficient explanation.
That’s just nonsense. Since there is no record of who commissioned or paid for the monument, we don’t know that it was not the family.
SORRY - YOUR CONVINCING ARGUMENT IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE
“Might have chanced” and “I imagine”, you say.
So I did what you asked, Septimus, and read THE SEVEN PAGES. And I looked for the arguments most surprising - “strongest” as you say.
The SEVEN PAGES are well ititled: it’s indeed a bunch of curious coincidences. The two most startling to me are the “Gentleman of many crowns” part, and the thing about the publishing rights of “Merchaunt of Venyce”. I can come up with a number of explanations other than OMG! that Shakespeare was really this dude “bound by a single letter” Oxford. In the end it is just “a few curiosities”
I also regret now having read it. The way the arguments for Oxford are presented there and here in this thread are strongly reminiscent of any other CT, and that is a rabbit hole I have no desire to dive into.
For the record, I couldn’t give a shit who “actually” wrote Hamlet. I don’t think it’s inconceivable Shakespeare ws a pen name. But absent proof, Occam woud suggest Stratford wrote (most of) it.
Oh, that crest? That ain’t a lion shaking a spear. That’s a lion displaying a broken lance it obviously took from whomever meant it harm.
To quote Firesign, “He say, ‘he can shout, don’t hear you.’” 
OK, finally, here’s an argument you’re making:
And which you’re immediately refuting yourself. How could de Vere have been “so famous as a playwright” if it was “taboo and shameful for him to write plays for public performance”?
A - I read the 7 page summary and all of my comments are of the form of “That’s not evidence, it’s a cherry picked coincidence, a vast leap of unsupported logic, or a misrepresentation of a poorly documented detail”. It’s like nailing jello to a wall. IMO, it all boils down to the idea that Great Works must come from Great Men, not someone from low status. As an argument against well documented authorship it fails miserably.
B - 7 pages is a pretty long summary. A single page with 2-3 of the best arguments would be a much better approach. As it is, there seems to be a lot of handwaving around the “poorer” points raised. If someone picks a point from the 7 pages and fully demolishes it, they don’t want to be told “Well that wasn’t an important point, how about this one?”
C - The purpose of this site is Fighting Ignorance. That’s not harassment.
D - Many Dopers have studied this as much or more than you have. Many learned scholars have gone through all these arguments many times, with fully supported documentation that argues for William Shakespeare being William Shakespeare. Yes, it’s a discussion, but some people really do have much more persuasive answers than anything the Oxfordians have ever presented.
Cosigning everything Telemark just said, including having carefully read the 7-page paper. The Oxford hypothesis is a classic unverifiable and unfalsifiable conspiracy theory: any apparent coincidence is supposed to be evidence in favor of the “hoax”, whereas any evidence against it is explained away as illustrating how successful the “hoax” was. There’s no arguing with that kind of “reasoning”.
There’s in general no way to judge the strength of coincidences in a summary so short on context. Coincidences are bad evidence in the first place, and conspiracy theorists never accept the kind of counter evidence available for coincidences anyway. But like the name coincidence appears strong to someone unaware that Baptista and Minola are normal Italian names, they can be strengthened or weakened by knowing the context surrounding them.
That’s a huge undertaking though, for very little pay off. People still believe in nonsense like the bible code, despite Brendan McKay’s work (with others) showing that you can find equivalent “codes” in Moby Dick. Since the coincidences here are much weaker and more vague than the bible codes, counter-examples are of necessity as weak and as vague, and thus as easy to dismiss.
I skimmed it. The gist seems to be that Shakespeare was born illiterate to illiterate parents and limited access to books at an early age, while Oxford had access to all that sort of stuff. There is a bunch more attempts to make compelling connections or show disconnects that leads, without actually showing any evidence, down a logical path to a conclusion the author wants the reader to make. It reminds me of many of the Loose Change type videos, except this is obviously a written paper, but it’s a similar tactic. I have to admit, I don’t know that much about the subject…I came in mostly to see what Rick was talking about.
You are obviously very passionate about this, and as I don’t know much about the subject (or, sorry, really care that much about it either), I’ll bow out. My impression with that paper, though, is it’s pretty standard CT format. Like I said, it’s like a lot of the Loose Change videos, or, maybe a better analogy is it has a Ancient Aliens or Chariots of the Gods vibe, using a lot of speculation and inference to guide the reader down a logic path to the conclusion the authors intend. I don’t know if a lot of the facts they bring up are real or not…in the Ancient Aliens shows they often play fast and loose with facts, or they twist or distort them to make a more compelling case…but from what I did see in the 7 pages, the reader has to make the same assumptions that the author wants them to in order to make the case compelling. It wasn’t that compelling to me, but that doesn’t really mean much as I’m not the target audience most likely.
septimus, your “AFAICT” does not exempt you from following the rules that proscribe accusations of lying. In fact, your response to erysichthon is in direct reply to his quoted statement. If you choose to not provide the significant evidence for your belief, that is your privilege. However, you will stop accusing (even by implication) other posters of lying.
[ /Moderation ]
Coincidences happen. Relying on them without acknowledging that is quite weak.
Regarding Peacham he is writing a book for the education of upper classes and gives a quick list of eight Elizabethan poets, at least four of them noblemen, at the end of several pages of lengthy descriptions of classical poets and earlier English poets.
He doesn’t mention Shakepeare, but neither does he mention a number of other playwrights such as Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene and Francis Beaumont. Maybe Peacham was in fact a human being, and a bit of a snob.
And Robert Zimmerman could not possibly be Bob Dylan. Born to hick parents in a hick town, no music training or poetry education, starts out in the uneducated folk music genre and ends up winning a Nobel Prize?
How many great artists were both to artist parents?
I mean, not to point out the obvious here, but all the greatest artists will of course be born to parents of vastly less artistic skill, since by definition the greatest artists are greater than anyone else. Of course Dylan’s parents were not skilled lyricists, Van gogh’s parents weren’t painters, Michaelangelo’s parents weren’t artists and Spielberg’s parents weren’t filmmakers.
Futhermore, while Shakespeare’s parents were not writers, or nobility, they weren’t dirt-eating peasants. His father was a successful businessman and local politician and his mother came from money. It would have been astounding had Shakespeare NOT gone to school; any family like his would have had their son educated.
As I said above, I’ve read a lot about authorship. Unfortunately for septimus, that means I’ve read a lot of the case for Francis Bacon, who was the prime candidate in the 20th century before the Oxford revival. Twain’s preferred candidate was Bacon, although defenders say he was satirizing the silliness of the controversy.
The case for Bacon consists of… coincidences. Parallel wordings, knowledge that Bacon had, coded hints in letters, his need to hide such low-brow work. All the same stuff that is trotted out as proof for Oxford.
Baconism went into full blown madness with the reams of Bible Code-like numerology it descended into, but before that the case went along the exact lines of Oxfordism.
In short, people made up their minds that Bacon was the true author and then combed through all of history trying to find something, anything that would confirm their belief.
That is exactly how conspiracy theories work.
Oxfordism is a low-grade conspiracy theory without a shred of positive evidence to back it up.
Since we’re giving cites, I recommend that people start with the two sites GIGO buster gave, https://shakespeareauthorship.com and https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/. Another interesting one was specifically designed to combat De Vere, https://oxfraud.com/. For some reason the links to the articles under 100 reasons don’t work for me, but there’s lots of other pages that do.
If you want books, the best is Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro. Shapiro is dismissed by Oxfordians because he is a genuine professor of English at Columbia and the author of many detailed books about Shakespeare and his times. Worse, although his book has a long section on the positive evidence for Shakespeare, much of the book is an examination of why people will believe anything as crazy as Shakespeare conspiracy theories.
Start there. And for the sake of your sanity (and blood pressure) end there.
The bust did not first show Shakespeare as a wool merchant. You can see the right hand is in a position to write. The early reproductions of the bust are almost certainly wrong. Dugdale, the antiquarian, was shoddy in many of his reproductions not just the Shakespeare one.
I don’t think it is known for certain that Shakespeare’s family did not commission the funerary monument. We simply don’t know who paid for it or who authored the inscription. However, we can be as good as certain his family at the very least approved of the funerary monument. If they approved of it then they approved the inscription below it.